Greetings Wizards, and happy new year!
I've been thinking hard these past few weeks about exactly what to do next, and I've made some updates to the roadmap.
Here they are:
First lets talk about spell upgrades.
Spell upgrades are a really cool idea. They are so cool in fact, that the store page text mentions them.
Rift Wizard's current set of spell upgrades, I believe, are quite far from the optimally interesting set of upgrades. Mostly they just buff the most obvious numerical aspects of the spell. There is still cool gameplay to be had here, but I think things can get even cooler.
Here are some examples of upgrades we're playing around with on the beta build right now:
- Earthquake Totem: Earth Sentinel can cast your earthquake spell on a cooldown
- Slaughter Bolt: When Magic Missile targets a living unit, it deals poison, dark, and physical damage instead of arcane damage (tripling its normal damage output)
- Chain Reaction: When Flame Burst kills a unit, it re-triggers a smaller blast at that unit's location
- Metal Swarm: Imp Swarm summons copper, tungsten, and furnace imps instead of iron, spark, and fire imps.
The new upgrades will tend towards expensive, build defining upgrades. Many of them will cost much more than the current upgrades. Some may preclude the player from purchasing other upgrades (metal swarm for instance, is not compatible with dark swarm).
Upgrades will be the big feature for this patch. I'm hoping to expand the upgrade list of ~50% of the game's spells.
There will also, of course, be a couple new skills, shrines, and monsters as well.
Lastly, I'm planning on putting a combat log UI into the game. I think this will help players figure out what exactly is happening during some of the crazier turns. I'll be working on this near the end of this patch's development cycle- which I expect to be 2 months- in order to allow time for balance testing of the new upgrades.
That will wrap it up for the first 2021 patch. Looking forward to the next one, I want to expand the game's ability to push the player into trying new ideas, and into inspiring interesting discussion and theory-crafting amongst the community.
Seeded runs, challenge modes, and leaderboards all fall under this umbrella. Previously I had planned to do all these things in the first 2021 patch- now that its here, I think that would be hyper aggressive and rushed. So I've revised the plan a bit: instead Ill be focusing on upgrades in the first patch, and I'll be focusing on seeded runs and challenge modes in the second.
Seeded runs and challenge modes go together quite well- a seed plus a set of challenges comprises a unique and special run that can be shared and communally attempted.
A specific set of challenges also makes a good achievement- so I'll be adding a few achievements to the game in this patch too.
Leaderboards would also go well with these two features- but there's enough value without them to launch them first, independent of leaderboards. Leaderboards also introduce the problem of scoring- a problem I'd like to take a stab at someday, but, later.
Once the game has the new upgrades and the challenge system, I'd like to clean things up a bit- UI wise, balance wise, bug wise- and graduate the game from Early Access. This is, in some ways, the least exciting update for current players- but also, the update most likely to expand the game's community and reach a larger audience. One big thing I' like to do here, is add in the ability for players to substitute in language files, and play the game in a language other than English. This is a tricky thing for a game composed mostly of text, so I'll be asking the community for some help doing the translation- especially translations to languages I do not speak, and translations of new text in ongoing patches.
Post Launch, the biggest feature I'd like to investigate, is Mod Support. Steam has a great UI for downloading mods, and the game is programmed entirely in python, which seems very amenable to mods. There are some mysterious tech factors here- I'm wondering if it will be possible to just let players share python scripts that add/modify/remove spells and monsters to the game- but barring any big showstopping problems this would be super cool to do.
Anyways, if you want to try out the new upgrades, be sure to set your game version to beta, and throw some feedback my way on the discord.